'Hawken' Is Why I Hope Free-To-Play Isn't The Future Of Video Games

Hawken is a multiplayer mech combat game that would be a great buy. But it's free to play, and that comes at a price.

Update 6/21/13: Having spent more time with the game and had discussions with Hawken's developers, I think my early gut reactions and first impressions to the free to play nature of the game were wrong. I still have some quibbles with the model, but as far as F2P models go, Hawken does a very good job and is only getting better over time.

I started playing Hawken yesterday. The mech combat game is graphically stunning, especially for an indie title. The terrain, the mechs themselves, all of it looks gorgeous. Indeed, beyond graphics, the control scheme and movement of the mechs feels great, though I haven't played a mech simulator in ages so I have little to compare it to.

But I just couldn't play for that long, because I knew that almost the entire game was blocked off to me behind the Freemium paywall. Such a good-looking game, such a shame it's been chopped up into pay-as-you-go morsels.

For instance, you start off with just one mech and you have to buy access to the others.

Yes, you can earn currency to put toward this effort as you play but you'll realize quickly that such an endeavor will cost you a great many hours.

And you'll be forced to fight against paying customers as you go since match-making is, as Nathan Grayson puts it, "basically broken. Seriously. It does not make matches. It breaks them. I’m not sure what arcane principles guide it to make the pairings it does, but a markedly higher-than-zero number of level 1-5 teams tossed into the deep end against level 20s forces me to suspect warlocks are involved."

Pay to win is a death sentence as far as I'm concerned. Free to play can work. In theory it could work quite well, but in practice very few games achieve that perfect balance and only a handful achieve a good balance. They almost always feel unsportsmanlike to me, and Hawken is no exception.

Now imagine the game cost $20 like Torchlight 2 (which sold over 1 million units in 2012) or even $40 or more. You'd have access to everything from the get-go, but might have to purchase DLC later on. Everyone would start out with access to all the mechs or would be able to unlock them simply by playing the game for X amount of hours. The playing field, at least in the beginning, would be level since everyone would have the same access.

I understand that people are looking to find better revenue streams for their games, but we shouldn't be breaking the very nature of games in order to do that. Free-to-play too often goes against the very grain of competitive gameplay and fairness that makes games fun in the first place. Hawken is certainly a very promising title, but it's been crippled badly by its adoption of a freemium revenue model.

Yes, this is still a game in beta form, but in a sense most free-to-play games always feel like they're in beta form unless you fork over a great deal more money than you would for a typical PC or console title.

As Grayson also notes, "free-to-play comes at a paradoxically high cost, roping off all mech classes except a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none recruit machine that looks like a walking television. (Somewhat hilariously, its codename is CR-T.) Hawken’s XP/in-game currency accumulation rate is quite slow, too, so unlocking any of the more interesting classes takes hours. In the meantime, you can always drop precious spacebucks on a slow trickle of items, weapons, and other miscellaneous upgrades, but the agonizing rate of progress certainly doesn’t befit Hawken’s race of fleet-footed colossi."

It's quite similar to the model you see utilized in so many free mobile games, and is another reason I find the prospect of the Ouya console with its "free only" game catalog a less-than-exciting one.